Fatness In Black Women

As mentioned previously in the historicization of fatness, fatness is a relative condition, dependent on the historical and cultural context, which is highly dependent on race. As such, the characterization of women as fat occurred very differently among white women and black women, therefore the fat stigma and connotations of fatness that they face are different. Consequently, it is important to understand the way in which black women’s appearance, within beauty and femininity, is racialized. Black women have long been conceptualized as outsiders, according to Eurocentric beauty standards and femininity. They fall into a categorization of extremes in which they are either asexual or hypersexual, masculine or excessively curvaceous, distinctly

This is not just because beauty standards are Eurocentric and created without regard to other races or ethnicities, but also because beauty would give them a degree of power and autonomy that historically no one has desired to grant them. For example, the fat black female body is never in control of its own sexuality. It is either erased, as is the case of the asexual Mammy, or it is fetishized and exploited by others, as with the Jezebel. In each case it is neither in the fat black woman’s power nor is it a source of their power. By excluding them from the Eurocentric beauty standards they exclude them from the social, political, and economic power that beauty would grant them, as exemplified in the earlier employment example. It becomes a cycle in which, black women are left powerless by the stereotypes prevalent in the society in which they are born (such as the Mammy, Sambo, or Coon). Unable to obtain power, due to these stereotypes, many black women, fat black women, in particular, fall into these stereotypes, as was the case with Linda Taylor, the figure upon which the Welfare Queen was based, perpetuating them for the next generation of black women. In short, beauty is not harmless, nor it is it arbitrary. It is a powerful tool for control and exclusion, in which fat black females are at a great